L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A column by Catherine Wagley When LACMA curator Stephanie Barron arrived in the galleries of the museum’s new Ken Price (1935-2012) retrospective yesterday morning, she saw three women bent over trying to get a look underneath Price’s sculpture The Hunchback of Venice. The sculpture is one of the first you see when you enter the show. “Apparently, they[…..]

Let’s delve into a weird place. Tunneling towards a mine of suppressed, latent, and untapped oddities, this rabbit hole burrows deep into the human psyche. Like a cognitive roll call, every repressed thought is buried here: the traumatically humiliating moment from your childhood, the impure dreams you had as a teen, and the irrational fears you disguise as an adult – this is a den[…..]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley David Batchelor, in his exquisite little pink book Chromophobia, describes a white he encountered on the walls of the home of an “Anglo-American art collector” he visited in the 1990s. He wrote, “There is a kind of white that repels everything that is inferior to it, and this is that kind of[…..]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley The following was originally written for Art21’s Blog and re-posted here with their permission. These musing are all loosely inspired by watching Mary Reid Kelley in the “History” episode in Season Six of Art in the Twenty-First Century, and by thinking about how family, history and family history play into contemporary art.[…..]

“Jack Goldstein is currently at work on a new film called “The Jump.” It is to be nineteen seconds long and will show a diver performing a somersault from a high board. But the high board and the water into which he plunges will be absent from the finished film…Goldstein is performing a set of operations that isolate, distill, alter, and augment the filmed recording[…..]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Inimitable novelist Norman Mailer and essayist Gore Vidal feuded on The Dick Cavett show in 1971. Vidal had written these two sentences for the New York Review of Books, in a review of Eva Fige’s book Patriarchal Attitudes: “There has been from Henry Miller and Normal Mailer to Charles Manson a logical[…..]

Two years ago, I had probably the best art summer I ever had. Ryan Trecartin’s show was at MOCA’s PDC satellite and I went 6 times, and it felt like a group show — or a show made by a group — even though it wasn’t. So as summer show season starts again, here’s a revisited homage to the group. L.A. Expanded: Notes from the[…..]